1 Chapter 1. Introduction: status and definition of compounding ...

+ N (maison de campagne vs. country-house, Sommerhaus) or denominal adj + N (lumière
solaire vs. sunlight, Sonnenlicht, but also solar flare) structures.
While the derivation of these compounds from a simple N/Adj + N construction would
seem to be unproblematic since both constituents occur as independent lexemes represented by
words (but cf. below for a different interpretation), the genesis of the synthetic compounds (the
tatpurušas or "verbale Rektionskomposita"), whose second constituent is deverbal and often
does not occur outside the compound in question (cf. Uhlich 2002: 405-7), as in L arti-fex
'craftsman' armi-fer weapon-carrier', Goth. arbi-numja 'heir', E chimney-sweep, church-goer, etc.
is less straightforward. The modern examples are predominantly nouns, but according to Jacobi
(1887: 13, 16), adjectival synthetic compounds were much more frequent in the older stages of
IE than nouns, and he suggested that the nouns should be regarded as substantivized adjectives. 16
The function of these formations was to convert a verbal expression (verb + dependent nominal /
adverbial complement) into a nominal, i.e. a process of syntactic recategorisation (cf. Kastovsky
1982: 182ff.). In the absence of genuine relative clauses, Jacobi suggested as source a participial
construction functioning as attribute to a nominal head. This had a special type of participle, a
"relative participle", as the second part of the emerging compound type, "weil die mit ihnen
gebildeten Composita inhaltlich Relativsätzen entsprechen und zwar solchen, die eine irgendwie
wichtige Eigenschaft derjenigen Person oder Sache beilegen, auf welche sie sich beziehen, oder
auch substantiviert diese Person oder Sache bezeichnen, welche immer in dem auflösenden
Relativsatz durch das Pron. rel. im Nom. angedeutet wird" ['because the compounds containing
them from a semantic point of view correspond to relative clauses, more specifically relative
clauses which attribute an apparently important property to the person or object to which they
relate, or they designate, in substantivized form, the person or object which is implied in the
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